Guest Lecture
"Competition among Competitors: evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry”
Andrew Schrank, Olive C. Watson Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs, Brown University
17/11, às 11:00
Auditório 118
Conjunto Didático das Ciências Sociais e Filosofia
About the lecture | Consumer protections allegedly pose a grave threat to ill-prepared producers of food, drugs, cosmetics, and chemicals in the Global South, and are therefore likely to be defended and disseminated by developed country governments and firms—that pioneered the development of safe products at low cost—and opposed by developing country competitors, who consider compliance a costly burden. But the following paper traces the advocacy and adoption of the “good manufacturing practices” (GMP) endorsed by the Pan-American Network for Drug Regulatory Harmonization not to foreign actors but to an at times tacit alliance of public procurement officers and localdrugmakers in the Dominican Republic (DR). While procurement officers tend to prioritize bulk purchases of generic drugs made by local manufacturers, in part to preserve scarce resources, they’re recruited, remunerated, and trained to minimize the risk of sickness and scandal, and therefore avoid irresponsible vendors. The result is a positive feedback loop in which firms that make competitive products win procurement contracts and not only reinvest their profits in their plants and personnel in an effort to win future tenders—thereby fostering income, employment, and export growth—but advocate and adopt global standards that keep their non-compliant competitors out of the market. The paper thus reveals that the formal practice of good manufacturing anticipated the formalization of good manufacturing practices in the DR and in so doing: first, offers a pragmatist alternative to prevailing accounts of regulatory harmonization; and, second, highlights the distinctiveness, pliability, and interdependence of private sector preferences in the Global South. While Dominican producers and policymakers parted company over foreign standards in the early twenty-first century, when compliance looked like a costly burden, they joined forces to pursue “learning by monitoring” over the course of the next two decades, and thereby turned a potentially costly burden into a powerful competitive asset over time.
About the lecturer | Andrew Schrank received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 2000 and is currently the Olive C. Watson Professor of Sociology and International & Public Affairs at Brown University. He is also a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research fellow in the program on "Innovation, Equity, and the Future of Prosperity." Schrank has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and many private foundations; consulted for the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, United Nations Development Programme, and a number of federal agencies; served on a half dozen editorial boards; and collaborated with Somos un Pueblo Unido, an immigrant rights organization based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Center for a New Economy in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His research has been published in leading journals in political science, sociology, international development, and Latin American studies. He is the co-author (with Michael Piore) of "Root-Cause Regulation: Protecting Work and Workers in the Twenty-First Century" (Harvard University Press 2018).
Participe também: Debate de Lançamento do Livro "The Economic Sociology of Development" de Andrew Schrank (Brown University), realizado em parceria com a FGV Direito SP - 16/11, 10h, Auditório - Rua Rocha, 233
